"Meditations on the Rainbow": Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Podcast II

Filled with great music...rare and priceless poetry from Sapphire all presented in that quirky, interactive, meditative, writing workshop-esque Eternal Summer style!

(this is a photo of the brilliant Sapphire...but this time it's actually Lex reading Sapphire's juicy poetic set)

This podcast is dedicated to all of us, but especially to Tyli'a Nana Boo Mack, a black transwoman made early ancestor in a brutal act of violence in Washington DC.

Get your pen and your paintbrush and listen here:

Eternal Summer Podcast Two!!!!

(If you listen to the end you'll hear Lex singing the blues!)

*Sapphire is not a particularly PG poet so this podcast is for grown folks and the folks they can be accountable for sharing it with.

The C-Section

For V.M. who gave birth to a healthy baby who the state immediately took away charging cruelty and neglect due to her choice not to have a c-section.

i.

(words used in the post-appeal court decision confirming the ruling)

cut

clerk copy credible

custody concession

child-protective contraction

cut

cut

critical cut

care completed

cut

colleagues conceded

consistent counsel

certify copy consent

cut

clear convincing comprehended

cut

control compliance consent

cut

conduct contends

concepts constitutional

citing crisis clothing color

caseworker cleared

claim care

cut

case confirmed

concepts committed

condone conclude confront condition

cognitive competency

college–educated consequences

confront uncontrollable combative

control care

critical cause

contemplate

continue

comprehend

continue

consider

continue

control care carefully

cut

calling counsel calling

Charchman calling

Chancery calling Christopher

calling clerk counsel colleagues

calling Coleman

calling Collier

claim credibility

claim consent

complications

class compliance

conduct control

change

consider coping

cut

culpable criminal cruelty

countervailing color conditions

clearly conflicts

childhood cancelled

cut

civil compelling

clarified concern

cooperate counsel

confirm cruelty

contact court

confront childhood

culpable civil

comprehensive cruelty

clearly conflict

central complaint

compensation cured

comments

cut

confer color

confer cruelty

confer contraditions

cut corpus

citing compelling comprehensive court-ordered complications

cut

call cruelty care

call cruelty concern

chronic court cruelty

cause crisis

call concession

cut

court-ordered

childbirth

construct cocaine connection

construct criminal corpus

construct conditions

continuously comment

considering color

cannot contemplate

cut

ii.

words nowhere/to be found

calm circle

comfort

candles

cradle

cuddle

coo

crying

celebration

cute

cereal

crib

carseat

cookies

creation

crazy constellation

complicit complacency

complete confabulation

cement confusion

cloaked co-optation

common cattle

choke crush cram choice

clinical close-mindedness

cowards cowards cowards

crooked core

corrupt crumbs

cold closure

cornered contained

cloistered caged

cord chorus

congregation cry

challenge classism

capture conscience

cry courage

cry coercion

clap choir clemency

cry capable courageous champion

crucible carrying confidence

crucial chain

cry craving

cry creation

c

Combahee Survival: Difficult

“We have found that it is very difficult to organize around Black feminist issues, difficult even to announce in certain contexts that we are Black feminists.”-Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977


What desire, anxiety, hope and love do you feel towards fellow members of your oppressed group?

What’s a time when you could not speak your political stance out loud? What caused that? What would it take to make your vision more speakable?

ARE YOU A BLACK FEMINIST? Why? Why not?

Send us your reflections about these questions at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com or leave a comment here!

Bring Lex to Your Campus, Organization or Community Center!

This year Alexis is using her best developed and most cherished skill-the art of the life-changing workshop-to raise funds to support her decision to spend the next year doing the MobileHomeComing an immersive intergenerational community documentation and education project based on her lust for back queer community! (It's weird that somehow I have to be consistent with a choice to talk about myself in the third person here, but I want to interject in the first person to say that your support means everything to me and it is evidence of the fact that it is possible to be a community supported, community accountable scholar in the 21st Century. :)

Bring Alexis to your campus, community center, to speak, or do a workshop that you will never forget!

at the Furious Flower Poetry Center!

Lectures:

Alexis is available to speak on a variety of topics and has tons of experiences speaking to audiences at elementary schools, college campuses, community centers, rallies, conferences and workshops. Click on the links for examples of public talks she has given in the past. She might particularly be a great person to complement your community or campus programming during Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Love Your Body Week, Celebration of Black Womanhood Week, Black Heritage Month, Women's History Month, National Coming Out Day, Mother's Day or throw tokenism to the wind and bring Alexis to speak and make any old day of the year a day filled with hope and magic!

Alexis's Academic CV

Workshops:

(Most workshops are available either as a one time session, a day-long intensive or a series within the NC Triangle or Triad areas. Get in touch about what works best for your community. Below are workshops that I have facilitated many times before. I can also design workshops specifically for your needs :)

Movement

Pressed for Knowledge: Alexis has facilitated this miraculous zine making workshop all over the United States in communities, on college campuses and at conferences. In this workshop participants (whether they are part of an existing group or are meeting for the first time on the day of the workshop) use the resources of urgency, homegrown brilliance and whatever's around to create their own publication in less than 2 hours. Alexis leads participants in a process of choosing an audience, a theme that connects their passions and a work structure and a group evaluation process for their own urgent publication! (NEW!!! Pressed for Knowledge is now available in a video version...where participants create and edit their own video in an amazingly short period of time!)

Grassroots Literary Production: Due to her experience leading the Pressed for Knowledge workshop and facilitating students at Duke University, UNC-Greensboro and the SpiritHouse Choosing Sides program in the creation of their own online and print collaborative publications, Alexis can train teachers, faculty and community cultural workers to make publication a part of their programming.

The Activist Impulse: Similar to the Pressed for Knowledge Workshop, this workshops leads participants through a process of deciding on, designing and enacting and evaluating a site-specific direct action. Alexis has led this workshop with a class of Duke University Students, at the Ethnic Studies and the Activist Impulse Symposium at Columbia University, the Beyond the Box Conference at Barnard College, the Anarchist People of Color SouthEast Regional Conference and more!

Legacy

(These workshops are grounded in Alexis's years of black feminist research and spiritual practice and are ideal for a community organization, school, department or group of people interested in how the theory, practice, poetry and lessons of black feminist practice apply to their present conditions)

Letters to Audre: developed in a special writing enrichment course that Alexis designed for Africana Women's Studies majors at Bennett College for Women, this workshop or series of workshops introduces participants to key works by black feminist lesbian poet, scholar, activist Audre Lorde. Participants create their own versions of/responses to poems and essays by Audre Lorde including Litany for Survival and The Uses of Anger. Participatns also write their own poetic letters to this literary feminist ancestor. See www.letterstoaudre.wordpress.com for examples. Alexis is also available to lead seminars for faculty, teachers, and community educators on Teaching Audre Lorde.

Letters to June: Along a similar model as the Letters to Audre Workshop, this curriculum was developed for a feminist theory course at UNC-Greensboro. Participants will write their own "Poem About My Rights" and "What's Love Got to Do With It" and also engage some of Jordan's lesser known and unpublished pieces. Alexis is also available to use her privileged access as the first researcher to view June Jordan's archival papers to lead seminars on Teaching June Jordan.

Litany for Survival: The Poetics of Community Building This writing and movement workshop, designed in collaboration with Ebony Golden starts from the grounding point of Audre Lorde's Litany for Survival and leads participants through a process of analyzing the poem for themselves, using theater of the oppressed methodologies to demonstrate what survival means for them and creating their own praise poems towards the survival of their own communities. This workshop was debuted at the Brecht Forum in New York City with an amazing response.

In Your Hands: The Depth of Legacy: based on a spiritual experience that Alexis had of recieving and writing down letters from chosen, (and uninvited!) black feminist ancestors including Fannie Lou Hamer, Nayo Watkins, Toni Cade Bambara, Octavia Butler and her own grandmother (see the letters and the video documentation of the process here) this workshop is designed to facilitate participants in listening for and to the legacies of their own chosen traditions. Alexis will facilitate a disucssion of some of the insights in the letters she recieved and each participant will leave with a plan and a way to make space for their own insights.

Sustainability

(these workshops are designed to keep community members, community organizers, students and teachers ALIVE AND WELL with full access to their love for themselves, each other and their inspired purpose!)


Habit Forming Love: This workshop shares the gifts of a 21 day process in which Alexis sought to learn how to love herself, her partner and her community better and to train herself in online video production and distribution. Available as a one time workshop or a skills building series, this workshop will allow participants to use new media technology to deepen and activate their love for themselves, their chosen family and their communities. Browse Alexis's video project here.

Mother Ourselves: Created in collaboration with Zachari Curtis for the Gumbo Yaya Sister Circle, and inspired by Audre Lorde's essay "Eye to Eye," this workshop provides participants with a safe space to examine their thoughts about the meaning of "mothering," and allows participants to explore what it might mean to nurture, teach and transform themselves. In this workshop we work in partners, listen to our bodies, use mirrors and talk about the affirming and difficult process of reflections linked to our varied experiencs with mothering.

Sustainability for Organizers and Activists: The workshop, designed for (and with) the organizers and visionaries in Critical Resistance, is about ENDING ACTIVIST BURN OUT!!!! Remembering that we, our bodies and our spirits are the most important resources for change, this workshop facilitates organizers in identifying the resources that keep them inspired and practices that can keep/get us well. Every participant leaves with their own visible reminder of their own wellness insights!

Vision

(These workshop are ideal for a community organization/project/coalition at a stage of inception or renewal.)

Dig: Grounding Community Transformation in Local Resources

Based on Alexis's poem dig, this workshop is designed to get community members in touch with the secrets, issues, and resources in their own communities and to build a shared analysis of those resources as a guide for their community projects and alliances. Each community will leave with at the very least, a group poem, new clarity about their resources and projects that connect and align their existing resources. The "dig" exercise has been enacted in Greensboro, Miami, Asheville and Gainesville as part of the Grassroots Media Justice Tour.

Wishful Thinking: Vision and Actualization Based on Alexis's poem in honor of black women and survivors of sexual violence in her community and recorded as a track on the SPEAK! CD this workshop leads participants through a meditation about their desires for their local communities and communities of affinity. Participants will leave with a community wishlist and individual affirmations. To see some of the results of the version of Wishful Thinking facilitated with the Speak Media Collective at the Women and Action in the Media Conference see www.wakeupnew.blogspot.com.

Support the Work:

(all proceeds go towards Alexis's work on the mobilehomecoming project and do not include travel and accomodation. Priority will be given to institutions in Lex's home region of the North Carolina Triangle and Triad areas.)

Lectures:

Colleges and University-$1000 for lecture or poetic performance ($2500 for a lecture or poetic performance, Q&A and an additional classroom visit)

Community Center/Non-profit- $200-300 for lecture ($500 for lecture and workshop)

Autonomous Community Spaces (independent bookstores, churches etc.)- $100 for lecture(with the possibility of just passing the hat if we can also have publications for sale)

Workshops:

( each workshop will result in a publication/poem/major accomplishment for participants to keep and for the sponsor to be proud of!):

Colleges and Universities- $1000 ($3500 for a series)

Community Center/Non-profit- $300-500 (discounts for smaller or rural orgs, talk to me) ($850-1000 for a series)

Living Rooms/Kitchen Tables- $100 or gather your people, pass the hat and have some yummy food on hand and I'm there!!! (maybe I was a travelling black feminist preacher in a past life...)

All suggested prices are really suggested. Get in touch. (brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com)

We can work something out.

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First Ever Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind PODCAST!!!!

Check out this FIRST EVER PODCAST as part of the BrokenBeautiful Press educational campaign "Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind." Black Feminism LIVES by every means necessary.

What does it take to survive a year like 1979?

This first podcast is about the year 1979 and how the world, and black feminism began and ended in some crucial ways that year. With the election of Ronald Reagan, the Boston Murders, the Atlanta Child Murders and the Greensboro Massacre all attacking the the lives, minds and spirits of black women 1979 was a crucial year. This podcast focuses on how Audre Lorde, Alexis DeVeaux, June Jordan and Barbara Smith reach(ed) across time and space to transform the meaning of survival. (And there is some good period appropriate and anachronistic music too!)

download to your itunes here:
http://brokenbeautiful.wordpress.com/files/2009/08/1979.m4a

Please leave comments here!

p.s. Sorry about the moments of outburst distortion. A sista is clearly super exuberantly excited about black feminism and promises to stay a little further away from the mic on podcast number two! :)

Motherful: Liberation as a Reading Practice

"The Silent Revolution of the Domestic Worker" Nikki Giovanni, 1975
"Throughly Black Feminism" interview with Barbara Smith, 1983
"An Interview with Audre Lorde," Joseph Beam, 1984
It's A Family Affair: The Real Live of Black Single Mothers, Barbara Omolade, 1986 (Kitchen Table Press, Freedom Organizing Series #4)
"Adolescent Pregnancy: The Perspective of the Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers, Khadijah Matin, 1986
"A Press of Our Own: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press" Barbara Smith, 1989
"Knowing the Danger and Going There Anyway," Cheryl Clarke, 1990
"Brother to Brother: An Interview with Essex Hemphill," 1991
The Black Back Ups, Kate Rushin, 1993
"The Fight is for Political and Economic Justice," Barbara Smith, 1998
"Transferences and Confluences: Black Poetics, the Black Arts Movement and Black Lesbian-Feminism, Cheryl Clarke, 1999
Erasure, Percival Everett, 2001
Erzulie's Skirt, Ana-Maurine Lara, 2006
The Fullness of Everything, Patricia Powell, 2009
"Reproductive Technology, Family Law, and the Postwelfare State: The California Same-Sex Parents' Rights "Victories" of 2005", Anna Marie Smith, 2009
"Race, Gender and Genetic Technologies: A New Reproductive Dystopia?" Dorothy E. Roberts, 2009

In the 1970's and 80's the Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers, an organization created by and for black single mothers, answered the media blitz, and intra-racial debates about the pathology of the "fatherless" home with a poetic question that reframed everything. Fatherless? They ask, Why not Motherful?

Brilliant brilliant brilliant. That one question is also followed up by their innovative programming and their creation of community support systems led by black single mothers, and black single fathers who were inspired by their model! Refusing to define black single mothers, regardless of age as a void, a source of darkness and the end of the world (as people sitting in congress and on war on poverty turned welfare reform boards were indeed insisting) this group of black single mothers made a poetic space for the obvious truth. Black single mother's themselves are the greatest resource for black female-led families. Only a black single mother knows what a black single mother needs. Black single mothers are experts. Act like you know America.

In a moment (right now) where CNN and Essence Magazine (ala Marry Your BabyDaddy Day!!!!) and black radio (Micheal Baisden just said the other day that "real women" need to step back and let a "real man" lead in their families. Yesterday!!! On August 4th 2009) are still selling the narrative that a black woman is incomplete without a patriarchal structure I want to raise the question again. Why not Motherful?

But actually I know why. Corporate media cannot acknowledge the fullness that single mothers, young mothers, mothers of color, co-mothers, grandmothers bring to our families because consumer capitalism is NOT HAVING IT!!! If we acknowledged that young, queer, poor, working-class, disabled, single, and racialized mothers are perfectly good at love and perfectly brilliant at supporting and sustaining life even if (or especially) they decide NOT to be bullied into a c-section by know-it-all doctors, how on earth would we get oppressed people to buy so much stuff despite their negligible disposable income? How would we get people to feel so inadequate about their their whatever"lessness" maybe it's "worthlessness" that they give up on the messy delicious sustenance of honest relationships between people and turn to the refuge of value by proxy...buying cool stuff. Because my people aren't dumb you know...and the only way you get brilliant people to act competely in opposition to their own interests is through a concerted effort to trample their self-esteem and believe that they will be loved. Why would maybeline et.al pay Essence Magazine so much for their adspace if black women were not killing themselves trying to be straight, bouncy and clean enough for some perpetual marriage without which their life means nothing?

No no no. Motherful is dangerous, like the fulness of the erotic, like "no mirrors in my nana's house," like telling little black girls that they are smart. You know...free stuff. Danger us.

And of course the state doesn't want no Motherful propaganda neither. No way. Even though it would totally save billions of dollars to support single poor and working mothers in their efforts to sustain their families instead of pathologizing them for not being able to do the impossible perfectly every second and just waiting with drool and glee to take their children away...just waiting with glee to lock their children up for childlike misjudgements, just licking its lips to the tune of fatherless....the state knows the danger of a motherful household.

What would it look like housesful of mothers, biological and chosen mothers, co-mothers, and mothers from next-door raising amazing children together. Proving the fact that marginalized, young, mothers of color can do anything together...imagine them proving that...right in front of the children. You might get a whole generation of children who are not supposed to be powerful who believe that they are. A whole set of mothers who organize to build and support education and free food and free healthcare in their communities. A whole generation of folks who realize that the state needs them more than they need it and that they are in charge. Nope. They don't want that.

Beware the motherful household.

And the certainly don't want young brothers and sisters like me and my siblings walking around proclaiming proudly that every thing we accomplish with our brazen badass brilliant selves was enabled by the fact that we were raised in a motherful household.

Nope. They don't want no Motherful propaganda.

I guess I have some t-shirts to make.

From Scratch

"Juegas Todos los Dias" Pablo Neruda, 1924
Home, Leroi Jones, 1966
Bid the Vassal Soar: Interpretive Essays on the Life and Poetry of Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton, M. A. Richmond, 1974
"Power" Audre Lorde 1976
"Butch on the Streets, 1981" Donna Allegra, 1981
Natural Birth, Toi Derricotte, 1983
A Daughter's Geography, Ntozake Shange, 1983
Joseph Beam interviews Audre Lorde on Grenada, 1983
Joseph Beam interview Sonia Sanchez (on Grenada and other things) 1984
"Brother to Brother" Joseph Beam(multiple drafts circa 1984)
A Burst of Light, Audre Lorde 1984
"Candy Calls Star to Her" Cheryl Clarke, 1989
"Making Ourselves from Scratch" Joseph Beam 1991
"My Mother's Daughter" Ira Jefferies 1992
"Her Thighs" Dorothy Allison, 1992
"Walt Whitman: A Model Femme" Christine Cassidy, 1992
"Praisesong for the Poet" Kate Rushin 1992
"The Ethical Vegetarian" Alexis DeVeaux, 1992
"I Lost it At the Movies" Jewelle Gomez, 1994
"The Crimson Snake" Honor Moore, 1994
"Estelle" Shay Youngblood, 1995
Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, Dorothy Allison, 1995
"The Birthday Presence" Donna Allegra, 1996
Ma-ka Diasporic Juks: Contemporary Writings by Queers of African Descent, Debbie Douglas, Courtnay McFarlane, Makeda Silvera and Douglas Stewart eds, 1997
esp "A House of Difference: Audre Lorde's Legacy to Lesbian and Gay Writers" by Cheryl Clarke
In Praise of our Teachers, ed Gloria Wade-Gayles, 2003
The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, ed. Nikky Finney, 2007
Bareed Mista3jil: True Stories, 2009
Sofrito pa Ti #1, Noemi Martinez, 2009
Citrus Dreams, Noemi Martinez, 2009
Hurricane Season (multi-media performance), Climbing Poetree, now

"Y'all look like a big old birthday cake right now!" Naima from Climbing Poetree

Last night at my kitchen table I learned that a friend and comrade is having a baby!!!!!! I was so giddy with excitement I couldn't be still, properly keep serving and arranging food or arrive at anything articulate to say. What do you say in the face of the fact that life starts again. People are born. It seems like a totally unlikely thing to happen and yet it is happening all the time. No number or quality of cheerleading moves can accurately express the joy I feel at the fact that a number of the amazing, brilliant world-changing women of color I know are mothers and are becoming mothers. It truly makes me more hopefully than a truckload of Obamas.

And maybe that's the place that I'm at this week. I don't feel like I have anything particularly smart to say...I am just caught in the light of celebration. As I sat in the Manuscript Reading Room at the Schomburg Center in Harlem I was affirmed by the knowledge that the love between Audre Lorde and Joseph Beam, Joseph Beam and Barbara Smith, Ella Baker and the young women in SNCC, Cheryl Clarke and the everyday creativity of black women, Cheryl Clarke and Assata Shakur's right to freedom, Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam, Toni Cade Bambara and the name "Joseph Fairchild Beam," Steven Fullwood and Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Cade Bambara and everyone that Cheryll Greene smiles with, Sdiane Bogus and Akasha Hull polaroids, Jacqui Alexander and sisterhood and persistance as an occasion to show up for, Audre Lorde and the project of black women learning to love each other, Joseph Beam and the radical act of the eighties, EXISTS. River transfusion. The light beam connecting spirit made evident in paper, living.

I do not come from nowhere. I come from this. So maybe it isn't so likely that people would be born. Even at 110 pounds with a full head of hair in the shrine of the Puerto Rican librarian.

:) happy birthday.

The Furious Flowering of Alexis Pauline Gumbs :)

Feeling hugely grateful to my Furious Poetry Seminar Family and my given and chosen family in general for giving me back to my poet self! It means everything to me that my community and family gave me the gift the key resources: time, poetry and inspiration for my birthday this year.

Love and love and love and love.
Yours...just like this.
Always,
Alexis

grow up poet: challenging the narrative meaning of life

"We grew up as poets. We grew up to be single Black mothers at war with poverty." June Jordan in a tribute to Audre Lorde

Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets of the Twenties ed Countee Cullen (1927)
"Reflections on Little Rock" Hannah Arendt (1959)
Generations: A Memoir Lucille Clifton (1969)
"Album" Lucille Clifton (1988)
"Female" Lucille Clifton (1988)
"quilting" Lucille Clifton (1991)
Lucifer series Lucille Clifton (1991)
"The Myth and Tradition of the Black Bulldagger" SDiane A. Bogus (1991)
"Word Warrior" Jan Clausen (1993)
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Giorgio Agamben (1995)
"amazons" Lucille Clifton (1996)
Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African American Women Akasha Hull (2001)
Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaelogy of Black Women's Lives Jenny Sharpe (2003)
"In the Mirror" Lucille Clifton (2004)
Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition Cheryl Wall (2005)
State of Exception Giorgio Agamben (2005)
Souls at the Crossroads, African on the Water: The Politics of Diasporic Melancholia Sara Clarke Kaplan (2007)
"Love and Violence/Maternity and Death: Black Feminism and the Politics of Reading (Un)representability" Sara Clarke Kaplan (2007)
"Popular Sentiments and Black Women's Studies: The Scholarly and Experiential Divide" Catherine Squires (2007)
"Where's the Violence? The Promise and Perils of Teaching Women of Color Studies" Grace Chang (2007)
"Downward Residential Mobility in Structural-Cultural Context: The Case of Disadvantaged Black Mothers" Katrina Bell McDonald and Bedelia Nicola Richard (2008)
"Intersectionality Heteronormativity and Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Families" Juan Battle and Colin Ashley (2008)
"The Black Mother Within: Notes on Feminism and the Classroom" Tiya Miles (2008)
"Lucille Clifton's Blessings and Mercies: Writing Spiritual Love as Social Power" Keith Leonard (forthcoming)


This week as part of the summer workshop for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows at Barnard College (affectionately known as research proposal writing bootcamp) I have been advising students on how to come up with compelling and specific research questions. "The meaning of life" I joked on Tuesday, is not a specific research question.
But in light of my response to what I've been reading recently and the miraculous success of the embodied poetic practice of the Mother Ourselves workshop on the Poetics of Community Building Ebony and I facilitated at the Brecht Forum that same day, I might need to revise that statement.

Yesterday, I told the same students (who I know I confuse way too much just by being my contradictory gemini self) that "black maternity is stolen authorship, transforming what life means on our bodies." Which has much to do with the way Hortense Spillers describes the "intervening narrative" of African American Literature as a response to the inscription of the flesh. And which also has to do with my birthday reclamation of myself as a poet at the Furious Flower poetry seminar last month. Let's hope the students pay more attention to what I do than to what I say. Because it's true, with every word choice, publication practice, community writing and research method, the meaning of life is at stake.
Which brings me to the question of form...in my dissertation chapter on survival (the revising of which brought me to most of the reading above) I talk about forms of life especially as elaborated in the theories of survival that June Jordan (HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!!) and Audre Lorde offer in two very different forms: the polemic and the poem. So as I revised I read lots of poetry (especially Lucille Clifton's amazon poems which invoke Audre Lorde) a review of Lorde's Undersong that came out right after her death, some important articles from the important journal Black Women Gender and Families which touched on the language of maternity in teaching, housing, queer family dynamics and political discourse, Cheryl Wall's insightful investigation into how black women writers trouble the idea of literary lineage and Akasha Hull's cosmically crucial study on how black women writers (including Lucille Clifton, Alice Walker, Sonia Sanchez, Toni Cade Bambara and Alexis De Veaux and herself) have been building spiritual repetoires of radically transformative creative work as part of an energetic shift in what life means on the planet.

All of this reading surrounded and bolstered me for the rereading my advisors actually suggested that I do which was of famous and very much envouge european theorists Georgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt. I gloss over Agamben in the earlier version of the chapter because I am very wary of the fact that many academic readers of my work who have read Agamben and have not read Lorde and Jordan would use their own differential familiarity with Agamben's work to displace Lorde and Jordan as the primary theorists of my work. The same is possible with Arendt whose work is newly trendy again. I didn't engage Arendt in the initial version of the chapter because I can hardly believe how blatantly racist she was in her take on school integration and the ethnic studies movement in the American university. However, I want to use this space to address their work on forms of life and natality in the context of the conversation that I am accountable to...one which views black maternity as a meaningful site for an intervention into the meaning of life.

So Agamben in his work on "bare life" and "the state of exception" reminds us of the ancient western distinction between "bios" and "zoe." Bios is described as mere life, including animal life, and also as "mere reproductive life." Zoe on the other hand is distinct, political life (as put in opposition to reproductive life). In other words...Zoe is life with meaning. Arendt's concept of natality the miraculous idea that the possibility of history and action change everytime a person is born. Arendt argues that this natal possibility is only meaningful within a narrative understanding of life that has a beginning a middle and an end and where the meaning of life is unitary. This Arendt insists is what seperates us from animals (and we see how great being seperate from animals has been for the life of our planet.) The reproduction of a social world in which birth and death mean what they mean now is a requisite for the impact of birth to have the exciting significance for action potential that Arendt ascribes it in her theorization of natality. As one would imagine, but neither theorist directly admits, these distinctions come with some unspoken ideas about personhood. As we know (and indeed as the implications of Agamben's work on the camp and the limits of life suggest) life if not uniformly legible, and not all narratives give birth the same exciting potential. In fact as my chapter on maternity documents, the interconnected narratives of slave code and abortion law, and welfare policy in the United States inscribe the figure of the black mother as mere reproductive life, or more accurately, life with negative meaning. Because of the law through which the child follows the condition of the enslaved mother the black mother becomes the cipher through which children can be born into illegibility...born without any legal rights, and in the rhetoric (welfare queen) and practice (welfare reform) of welfare legislation the poor black mother is carcicatured and characterized as she who produces meaningless life, babies who are nothing more than a way to cheat the system for welfare benefits.

It is not a mere coincidence (though maybe a reproductive one) that in Arendt's analysis, the student movement was pure until it was corrupted by black students (corrupted by their dangerous and dirty black mothers) who she says introduced violence into the student movement, or that in her article arguing against school disegregation that she pathologizes parents who would dare encouarge their children to participate in the struggle for civil rights, relating that all she could think of during the attempted desegregation in Little Rock was of the absentee father who was not on the scene with his daughter who was attempting to integrate the school system..right before insisting that the federal government should not intervene in local school system...suggesting that those without visible present fathers also do not deserve the protection of the state (not to mention the right of education.) Arendt goes on to insist that the right of full choice in marriage (in this case across race) is a much more primary right than the right to equal access to education or public space or transportation, and then to chastize civil rights organizers for prioritizing those issues...when evidently access to inter-racial marriage is so much more important.

Of course we see echoes of this privileging of access to the patriarchal institution of marriage over the general rights that all people and communities deserve (healthcare, housing, immigration rights for loved ones) in the contemporay mainstream Lesbian and Gay movement's prioritization of marriage, a choice that black feminists Barbara Smith and Cheryl Clarke have critiqued exactly on the grounds that political and economic rights are the real issue, especially in queer communities of color. Anyway, I'm so angry that I am about to get off track, but the point is it seems to me that Arendt's theorization of natality and the meaning of life is consistent with the pathologization of black mothering. In fact the importance of natality...the actions and the context...the narrative through which life is understood...is the very reason that black women's claim on mothering and authority is continually criminalized IN the narrative of US law and policy. If the meaning of life is at stake, and the context of the narrative through which we have been understanding life must be preserved, no wonder black mothers are dangerous and (as Rickie Solinger teaches us) mothering is a class privilege.
If we can trouble the reproduction of the narrative of life and death in this way (think about the poetic interventions of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker who insist that their lives and their work do not start or end with their individual lives, think of M. Jaqui Alexander who reminds us about african-based spiritual practices in the diaspora that disrupt narrative unity by finding life energy, parentage, ancestors and theory in the wind and trees) this also pushes back against the division between life and life (bios and zoe) that Agamben starts with, not through the spacial exception, but though the site of reproduction. In other words if we can understand that the site of reproduction (sometimes called the black mother) IS the site of meaning-making, we have a new form of authority that might not reproduce status quo, the political narrative through which we have been mediating life.

For example, what if we grow up poets? What if (as suggested by Jordan's choice in the epigraph to this post) growing up poets and growing up single Black mothers at war with poverty and racist violence is directly related? What if we grow up refusing the discipline of beginning middle and end choosing instead the structure of resonance, echo, nuance and multiplicity? What if we refuse to channel our children into the institutional coherence and legibility of heteronormative family and marriage? What if we co-mother? What if we ancestor-worship? What if we are June Jordan and Audre Lorde and Pat Parker on consecutive rotating days? What does birth mean then? What if we steal authority, such that the mere reprodutivity of our lives means everything, instead of meaning nothing?

Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt. No wonder you didn't want black students to take over the University. No wonder you are horrified by watching black girls attempting to go to school. Here I am Hannah Arendt. Born again and still taking over. Hannah Arendt. it is summer semester. And I am stealing your term. Instead of the narrative natality that Arendt proposes....(I call it narrative because it insists on the need for the continutation of a pre-existing narrative for the meaningfulness of life) I intervene (we intervene) with a poetic natality that centers those criminalized practices of black mothering in the face of poverty and that threaten a western story about what life means.

Lol. Be horrified. We're back :)

lexical earthday....

Oh my goodness y'all! Before the week is out I will be 27...also known as GROWN!!!!
Feel free to send wishes, love, and advice. I am thrilled about the juicy goodness of knowing you this lifetime!